The Struggle of the Magicians. Choreographed and staged by Georg Gurdjieff for the first time more than a century ago, this ballet became a magnet attracting thousands of spiritually disillusioned men and women to performances in Europe and the U.S. after WW I, then it simply vanished from sight after WW II. Its reappearance in print commemorates the birthday of Mr. Gurdjieff 131 years ago (Jan 13, 1872)

During the reigns of Ramses II and his successors, from about 1300 BC to 1150 BC, a social class of well-educated secular royal scribes and temple craftsmen appeared in Ancient Egypt rivaling the traditional priesthood in cultural influence, if not power. In their hands a new genre of literature took shape: Secular love poetry depicting in hieratic script real flesh-and-blood men and women, expressing real emotions and speaking to one another with real, often erotic and tender human feelings for the first time. Unfortunately, this state of affairs was to last only as long as the reigns of...

"It began one afternoon nearly 30 years ago in the basement of the Rare Books Library at Tuskeegee University. Looking through a microfilm roller at the papers of Jean Toomer, an African-American novelist of the 1920's Harlem Renaissance, I scrolled pass the first page of a handwritten copy of Georg I. Gurdjieff's ballet Struggle of the Magicians on the roller. Not even typewritten. I scrolled back to it." So begins the author's notes to the first of a four-volume collection of plays documenting the evolution of a self-taught amateur playwright from a know-nothing to a homespun veteran of 22...